Group exhibition, Innsbruck/Austria:
In Other Words…? Discoures with Poetic Function

…on the edge of successful adaptation that is so ingenious that one goes from almost the same to something else, to something new, which is only morally obligated to the original.—Umberto Eco

Variations and versions are central components of a globalized and constantly faster-paced everyday culture. Only a short time after their introduction, products and services—especially in the field of information technology—are quickly expanded, reformulated and refined, and different versions are produced for different markets. The functions and properties of goods are continually being adapted to consumers’ needs, which leads to the worldwide economic network constantly spitting out new remakes, reproductions and also imitations and unauthorized fakes—can we talk about interpretations?

Regarding the development of such market tendencies, the exhibition In Other Words…? Discourses with Poetic Function traces strategies of a kind of ‘cultural versioning’ in the sense of interpretation. The exhibition shows conceptual approaches that resort to existing “cultural texts” (1) from everyday activities or social-political conventions and/or social relations and reuse them two, three or multiple times. At the interface between Literature and Visual Arts and within the context of the writing of history, institutional critique and the (non-)transparency of public structures, the primarily language-based artworks are embedded in a reciprocal system of “media cultural self-explanation,” (2) whose self-analytical moment is central as a formal condition for artistic production.

Beginning with the aesthetic effect of the self-referential field of artistic activity, the exhibition orients itself via the philological-linguistic concept of the “poetic function” of language. (3) In this Structuralist concept, language does not refer to any object in a reality external to language but rather to elements and categories of language itself. The artworks presented here go a step further. Purposelessness, self-analysis and poetic autonomy are confronted with the context of extra-linguistic discourse and, consequently, with topics such as those of media and art studies, so-called tendencies toward democratization, virtualized social relationships, marketing strategies within the art world and the construction of literary forms and everyday rites. In analyzing their own conditions of existence, the artworks refer in equal measure to themselves and beyond themselves, and the processes of interpretation, raised to the status of facts, slide back in the end into the social-political discourses from which they also originate.

Borrowing Roman Jakobson’s division into intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic forms of interpretation (4), we can determine different artistic strategies in this exhibition. Among them are the conversion of cultural products from their original form of representation into a completely new one; methods of reformulation in the sense of reproductions that allow the ‘original’ to remain recognizable, and also transference of signs within various semiotic systems. Regarding the methods of “contextualizing interpretation” (5), which can be read as critical remarks or commentary on the ‘original text’, the exhibition In Other Words…? Discourses with Poetic Function investigates developments that contribute in the end to ‘cultural versioning’. In the process, source texts end up in entirely new variations, resulting in new originals; texts are literally interpreted and inverted with the help of cultural texts—in the end, almost the same thing is said in other words.

In this area of tension, Michael Kargl, in his Internet-based work semantics (2009), reduces the websites of so-called global players, like H&M, McDonalds, and Shell, to their textual architecture. Through the programmed deletion of the contents of the websites, which are fed into the software system by users, natural language is transferred into digital code, text into images, and context into structure. The leveling-out of content through deletion of signifying components can be understood both as a totalitarian and democratic process, which plays on the procedures of an unregulated liberalization of the market, thereby putting it up for discussion. The blending of signs and objects, of content and form, behaves, in the process, as a structure that does not speak “about things, but rather… on the same level as the state of things or the conditions of their contents.” (6)

In his work daily mapping (2005-present) Arnold Reinthaler also deals in a reductionistic way. He transfers temporal processes of everyday activities (his own) onto graphic monochrome surfaces on paper. He leaves the interpretation of his meticulous recordings to the reader. His artistic activity of constantly repeated recording is “legible as a technique of (projective) self-assurance. In this conception, it is not a question of what the activity means, but that it is carried out. (…) Precisely the aesthetic indifference and uniformity of the chronometric units in Reinthaler’s temporal semantics evoke, in the end, the (supposedly) reassuring illusion of the possibility of continuing his own project.” (7)

Communication for the sake of communication takes place in Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit’s network performance Umsätze im Detail (Transactions in Detail, 2007). A system for transferring money (the artist’s online bank accounts) is used as a platform for sending trivial short messages by transferring insignificant sums. The aesthetic effect of this work, which refers to the fleeting messages of forms of communication such as SMS, chat rooms, or Twitter and carries them over ad absurdum into a strictly secure and private context like that of the bank, develops through its alienation of use, or, in the words of Guy Debord, through the “loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element—which may go so far as to lose its original sense completely—and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.”(8)

Maria Anwander exhibits, as her own collection of art (and consequently as her own work of art), stolen title cards from existing artworks by sometimes established, sometimes young artists in My Most Favourite Art (2004-2010). Viewers are only able to imagine the original work of art. Depending on their respective knowledge of art and art history, the pictures imagined will relate more or less to the actual art objects. Through the relationship between text and images (or collected installations, videos, sculptures, etc.), “through the isolation of the titles and authors from the related works and through the so absurd excessiveness of the cards, the principle of authorship is made to lead pleasurably into nothing” (9) and raise questions as to the modes of representation in an institutional context.

Lisa Rastl’s video work Zen for Doing (2008) is based on repetition. She completes a media reproduction loop that combines an early Fluxus performance by Nam June Paik and its photographic documentation with two further levels of reproduction. The video shows the artist at work in her job as a reproduction photographer for the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. She is responsible for making reproductions of photographic documentations of performances. Her own “performance” as a commercial photographer “closes for a moment the circle of the media constellation when the ‘acting in the present moment,’ which Paik and George Brecht elevated in their works to a creed, manifests itself as a closed circuit in the act of ‘re’-photographing.” (10) In addition, the artist opens up a discussion over the possibility of exhibiting performance art in museum contexts.

If one understands contemporary art reception as “integrated in the world of celebrity, the institutions’ calculations of efficiency and city marketing, connections to pop and soap operas, and child–friendly interactivity,” (11) then the artist duo Johanna Tinzl / Stefan Flunger play with the spectacular culture of the art world. The audio installation Countdown (2008/2010) is an attempt to evoke an emotional reaction from the listeners by counting down to an event, from nine to zero, in different languages in public space. The expectations built up in this way remain unfulfilled, since the announced event only consists of ten seconds of silence, providing a large degree of openness in the interpretation of what is not represented.

Anna Artaker makes use of the interplay between verbal and non-verbal systems of signs in Personenalphabet (A Portrait of the Artist as an Alphabet) (2008), in which she appropriates portrait photographs of famous people from everyday visual culture and history. Each of the thirty-two reproductions—which is first photographically reproduced, then digitized, and finally photocopied at a lower quality—stands for a letter of the alphabet. The artist replaces the system of language agreed upon by society with her own subjective visual system. She contrasts conventional modes of interpretation with her own knowledge of the media. The viewers are requested to decipher the text–image relationships as a series of words.

In an entirely different way, Ruben Aubrecht requires the viewers to be ready to engage in active interpretation for a picture (2004). He demonstrates conventional patterns of reading and perceiving by blocking the interpretation of an image on multiple levels. At first sight, a digital photograph is staged in a narrative arrangement, as a book, through its source code. Upon closer examination, this image cannot, however, be read in the usual sense; it must be viewed as an image. The use of software allows the artist to make a piece of reality disappear, while this software proves to be “very difficult material” “and immateriality as an almost factual materiality—which, however, defies our (visual, tactile) sensory perception.” (12)

Starting from research into the utopian project Biosphere 2, in which scientists in the early nineteen-nineties lived in a closed ecosystem for several years to investigate, among other things, future colonies to outer space, Ralo Mayer reproduces real events in continually new fictional arrangements and systems of signs. In a performance-like investigation, the artist acts as a translator of a fictional novel, and, using the strategies of text interpretation, he reconstructs models of the world and model worlds (in reference to J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, Mayer calls this HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS). These are researched again and again and analyzed within the context of forms of social action. “Describing the failure of utopia would probably be too easy,” the artist claims. “The question I ask myself is, ‘Can I describe something so that something new is also created?’”

References:
(1) See Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2006.
(2) Ibid., p. 82.
(3) Roman Jakobson, Linguistik und Poetik, in: Jens Ihwe (ed.), Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, pp. 142-78, quoted in: Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering (eds.), Grundzüge der Literaturwissenschaft, DTV, Munich, 2005.
(4) See Umberto Eco, Quasi dasselbe mit anderen Worten: Über das Übersetzen, Hanser, Munich and Vienna, 2006, pp. 267-68.
(5) Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2006, p. 67.
(6) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus, Merve Verlag: Berlin, 1997, p. 122.
(7) David Komary, time offset, phase signatures, in: David Komary (ed.), dreizehnzwei – selected exhibitions, Schlebrügge, Vienna, 2008, pp. 46–47.
(8) Guy Debord, Writings from the Situationist International 1957 – 61, in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory, 1900 – 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, 2003, p. 704.
(9) Raimar Stange, Gut geklaut . . . ! Maria Anwander – My Most Favourite Art 2004 – 2009, exh. cat., Fundación Bilbao Arte Fundazioa, Bilbao, 2009, p. 2.
(10) Eva Maria Stadler, Lisa Rastl, in: Agnes Husslein–Arco (ed.), Empfindung oder in der Nähe der Fehler liegen die Wirkungen, exh. cat., Vienna, 2009, p. 129.
(11) Diedrich Diederichsen, Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 2008, p. 195.
(12) Inke Arns, Die Windungen der Schlange: Minoritäre Taktiken im Zeitalter der Transparenz, p. 120, in: Jens Kastner, Bettina Spörr, (eds.), nicht alles tun. Ziviler und Sozialer Ungehorsam an den Schnittstellen von Kunst, radikaler Politik und Technologie, Unrast–Verlag: Münster, 2008, pp. 117–31.
(13) Eva Maria Stadler, Ralo Mayer im Gespräch mit Eva Maria Stadler, in: Ralo Mayer. Das Muster der Schatten des Spaceframe der Biosphere 2…, exh. Cat. Secession, Vienna, 2008, p. 7.

Maria Anwander
My Most Favourite Art (2004-2010) | 72 title cards, dimensions variable

Many artworks fascinate Maria Anwander—artworks by Monica Bonvicini, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Demand, Ruben Aubrecht, Teresa Margolles, to name just a few. All these artworks have accompanied the artist over the development of her career to date. For the wall installation My Most Favourite Art she has collected title plates from international museums, art spaces and galleries over many years. In the art space, the artist presents the nameplates, removed from the walls without permission (stolen from the art institutions!) as souvenirs, as an encyclopedia of her preferences and ultimately as her own artwork. Viewers are required to give free rein to their imaginations—via the work titles, years of creation, technical specificities, photo credits and the logos of institutions—to conjure up the art works with the aid of their own backgrounds. This personal collection of linguistic representations of visual art can also be read, finally, as the source of inspiration for Maria Anwander’s biography as an artist.

Biography — Maria Anwander, born 1980 in Bregenz, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Wien (Theater, Film, and Media Studies) as well as at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Performance Sculpture) | Selected exhibitions: My Most Favourite Art (Bilbao Arte Fundazioa, Bilbao 2009), unORTnung V—ankerbrotfabrik (Vienna 2009), Neue Mitglieder (Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz 2009), Am Sprung (OK-Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz 2008), Kapital—Körper—Konventionen (Forum Schloss Wolkersdorf 2008)

Anna Artaker
Personenalphabet (A Portrait of the Artist as an Alphabet) (2008) | 32 black-and-white copies, A3 format

Andy Warhol, Alfred Hitchcock and Anne Frank are for A, Romy Schneider for R and Susan Sontag for S. Anna Artaker’s Personenalphabet (A Portrait of the Artist as an Alphabet) consists of an arrangement of 32 portraits of famous figures from politics and culture. At first glance the stringing together of photos appears associative, but if the readers succeed in identifying and recalling the first initials of each person and combining them then individual words emerge, which finally form an entire sentence. The legibility of the sequence of images as a sequence of eight words (a, portrait, of, the, artist, as, an, alphabet) becomes a question about the common memory of people and knowledge of the media shared by the author of the work and her audience. The larger the overlap the more successful the interpretation of the individual signs will be—and the more successful will be the reconstruction of the person alphabet as a self-portrait of the artist.

Biography — Anna Artaker, born 1976 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Wien and at the Université Paris 8 (Philosophy, Political Science) as well as at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Vienna (Conceptual Art) | Selected exhibitions: 48 Köpfe aus dem Merkurov Museum (Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg 2009), Modernologies (MACBA—Museu d’art contemporani de Barcelona 2009), Fortsetzung Folgt. (Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna 2009), Am Sprung (OK-Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz 2008), Urban Signs—Local Strategies (Fluc am Praterstern, Vienna 2008)

Ruben Aubrecht
a picture (2004) | Book, 253 pages (207 x 139 x 15 mm), edition of twelve

Page upon page of special typographic characters and punctuation marks, dates and now and then some concrete details about, for example, the Mac OSX operating system. In Ruben Aubrecht’s artist’s book a picture photography does not immediately come to mind. Yet the artist has broken down an unspecified digital photograph—a picture, as the title states and simultaneously leaves open—into its informational components. The source code, usually transcribed by the computer in order for the data to be viewable by a user, has been linearly itemized and, at the first casual glance, seems to follow a seemingly narrative arrangement. The original image eludes perception in favor of a text that is as difficult to read and interpret as the image. Without digital processing, again it can only be perceived as a visual unity, as an image: letter upon letter, geometrical form upon geometrical form, sign for sign.

Biography — Ruben Aubrecht, born 1980 in Bregenz. Lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Computer and Video Art) | Selected exhibitions: Ruben Aubrecht (Video, Fotografie)… (Traklhaus Salzburg, Künstlerhaus Bregenz, Palais Thurn & Taxis, Bregenz 2010), Portrait (Palais Thurn & Taxis, Bregenz 2009), Visions in the Nunnery (The Nunnery Gallery, London 2009), Neue Mitglieder (Künstlerhaus Palais Thurn & Taxis, Bregenz 2009), Am Sprung (OK-Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz 2008)

Michael Kargl
semantics (2009–2010) | Black-and-white copies, A0 format

Letters and numbers, words and entire sentences are all replaced by the same place-holding symbol: with Michael Kargl’s originally Internet-based work semantics, users can feed Web addresses into a software system via a form, which returns the selected site in a form that visualizes its structure. The meaning and content seem to have been deleted, text made into image, context into structure; the viewer is no longer looking at the surface but at the architecture beneath it. The material components of linguistic expressions, its form, have been pushed to the foreground at the expense of the conceptual content and its application. Interpretation is now only possible on a formal level: is the leveling of contents by replacing their meaningful components with apparently meaningless symbols a democratizing or a totalitarian process?

Biography — Michael Kargl, born 1975 in Hall, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg (Sculpture) | Selected exhibitions: On Gaps and Silent Documents (Steuk, Leuven 2010), Interzone/Economy (Galerija Galzenica, Velika Gorica 2009), anti-bodies (Art & Social Technologies Research, Plymouth 2009), Im Prinzip, zeitbasiert (Fluc am Praterstern, Vienna 2009), Paraflows—Utopia (MAK—Gegenwartskunstdepot, Vienna 2008), Bild—Macht—Wissen (Galerie 5020, Salzburg 2008), You own me now until you forget about me. (Mala Galerija/Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana 2008), lastwishes (LX 2.0—Lisboa arte contemporânea, Lisbon 2007)

Ralo Mayer
“Übersetzung und Verrat” (screen test “The Ninth Biospherian” / Geller’s trance #1) (2010) | Two-channel video with glass installation, 15 min

In his research series HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS, Ralo Mayer analyzes miniature worlds, model worlds and their effects on forms of action and cultural practices. As a point of departure he uses the Biosphere 2 project, a sealed ecosystem created in Arizona in the early 1990s, in which eight scientists lived and researched for two years. Mayer approaches this project as the translator of an imaginary science-fiction novel, The Ninth Biospherian, by Roni Layerson. The book only takes on form through its translation into various versions and media formats and through the translator’s interpretations. By way of a film script, performances, comics, miniatures of science-fiction novels and spatial scenarios, the artist develops narrative structures and investigates model worlds through fictional as well as documentary material. Mayer describes his artistic field of activity as ‘performative research’.

Biography — Ralo Mayer, born 1976 in Eisenstadt, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Wien, Vienna (Comparative Literature, Linguistics) as well as at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Vienna (Conceptual Art) | Selected exhibitions: Postalternativ (Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna 2009), Kommentar als selber was (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna 2009), Preparatory Ways (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 2009), Das Muster der Schatten des Spaceframe… (Secession, Vienna 2008), Ein Blick durch Millionen Tropfen… (Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck 2008)

Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit
Umsätze im Detail (2007) | Bank statements (printouts), ca. 300

Reassurance: it’s about nothing anyway, me&computer: much too slow, good: lack of money makes you diligent: personal irrelevant messages couple with intimate admissions, rapture over a positive experience fraternizes with displeasure over lack of funds. For the installation Umsätze im Detail Barbara Musil and Karo Szmit utilize a special digital network in order to communicate with one another over a number of months. Not over Twitter or Facebook or any of the other platforms defined as ‘social’, but via the artists’ two bank accounts. Through transfers of minor sums back and forth between them, the artists appropriated the space labeled “purpose” for their messages, entrusting their communication to a network known for its discretion. Through conscious misinterpretation, Musil and Szmit take up the supposed democratic esprit of Web 2.0 and push it ad absurdum—misuse of the purpose.

Biography — Karo Szmit, born 1978, in Warsaw, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Kunstuniversität Linz (Experimental Design) | Selected exhibitions: Export Import Linz Türkei (Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz 2009), Wolkendiagramm (Internationales Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz 2009), My Dear Paranoia (Vaal Gallery, Tallinn 2009), Ich habe nicht genug, ihr matten Augen (Universal Cube, Leipzig 2008), Leben im Strafraum (Kunstmuseum Lentos, Linz 2008)

Lisa Rastl
Zen for Doing (2009) | Video, 8:30 min

Zen for Doing is an eight-and-a-half-minute-long documentation video that shows Lisa Rastl working as a commercial photographer for the exhibition Nam June Paik: Music for All Senses, shown at the Museum of Modern Art (Momuk) in Vienna in spring 2009. Her schematic work consists in reproducing documentary pictures of one of Nam June Paik’s early performances, titled Zen for Head (1963): color balance, lighting, gray scale and white gloves. The photographer’s work-flow and the reproduction loop, in which she is inevitably embedded, are only interrupted by the clicking and flashing when the camera shutter opens and closes again shortly afterwards. At exactly this casual, random moment, a new work of art comes into being; reproduction and that which is reproduced appear in a non-causal relationship, and the medium of photography opens up to the viewer’s interpretation ‘by doing’—in a performative act.

Biography — Lisa Rastl, born 1974 in Mödling, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Schule für künstlerische Fotografie in Vienna (Friedl Kubelka) as well as at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (Textual Sculpture) | Selected exhibitions: Jan Olle Gulin Stipendium (Villa Arson, Nice 2010), KunstKunst (Galerie 5020, Salzburg 2009), Zugriff! (Künstlerhaus Dortmund 2009), Empfindungen oder in der Nähe der Fehler liegen die Wirkungen (Augarten Contemporary, Vienna 2009), work in progress (Groeninge Museum, Bruges 2008), BKA Auslandstipendium für Fotografie (Paris 2005)

Arnold Reinthaler
daily mapping (2008-present) | Acrylic paint and bookkeeping ledger paper (journal), edition of six, 93 x 30 cm

In many of his works, Arnold Reinthaler divides time into its immaterial components, reflecting the artistic subject—himself—in an arrangement made of past, present, and future; at the same moment, he recapitulates his findings in the form of constant recordings. In daily mapping, conceived as a project stretched out across multiple years, the artist visualizes everyday activities, such as sleeping, eating, visiting exhibitions or meeting with friends, and organizes these individual sequences of life into categories and cycles such as personal hygiene, social communication (face-to-face communication and tele-techniques) or cultural reception. The meticulous recordings are transcribed in different gray monochrome surfaces on bookkeeping paper. The artist’s goal is at some point, through the interpretation of the collected data, to be able to remember forward and perhaps in this way to live entirely according to an aesthetic image.

Biography — Arnold Reinthaler, born 1971 in Wels, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Kunstuniversität Linz (Sculpture and Cultural Studies) and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (Sculpture) | Selected exhibitions: tweakfest—dock 18 (Alten Börse, Zurich 2009), dinnershow—dock 18 (Rote Fabrik, Vienna/Zurich 2009), Lachhaft: Über das Komische in allen Lebenslagen (Oberösterreichische Kulturvermerke, Gmunden 2009), Die Zeit und ihre Pulsschläge (Internationale Akademie, Traunkirchen 2009), Traverse Video Festival (Toulouse 2008)

Johanna Tinzl and Stefan Flunger
Countdown (2008/2010) | Bullhorn loudspeaker, CD player, amplifier, cable

A metronome ticks sixty beats per minute, second for second, in an endless loop, transmitted into public space over two horn loudspeakers made out of sheet metal. Soft and insistent, the ticking pervades the Kleinen Hofgarten in Innsbruck. Time passes until suddenly the monotonous rhythm of the sound installation Countdown is harshly interrupted: nine, eight, seven, six, five … The countdown from nine to zero is part of a choreography defined by Johanna Tinzl and Stefan Flunger: an event is announced in various languages that, ultimately, comprises ten seconds of silence. Then the process begins all over again, each time in a new language. The artists inspire associations and emotional reactions with Countdown, without, however, fulfilling expectations. They maintain the highest degree of openness in the interpretation of the work.

Biography — Johanna Tinzl, born 1976 in Innsbruck, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg (Sculpture) as well as at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna (Transmedia Art) | Selected exhibitions: Personae (Atelier Operngasse, Vienna 2009), Living Spaces—Living Forms (Galerie 5020, Salzburg 2009), unORTung V—Ankerbrotfabrik (Vienna 2009), Austria Contemporary (Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg 2008), Artists on Tour (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna 2008), unORTnung IV—Copa Cagrana (Vienna 2008)

Biography — Stefan Flunger, born 1969 in Zams, lives and works in Vienna | Studied at the Universität Innsbruck (Art History) | Selected exhibitions: Personae (Atelier Operngasse, Vienna 2009), Living Spaces—Living Forms (Galerie 5020, Salzburg 2009), unORTung V—Ankerbrotfabrik (Vienna 2009), Austria Contemporary (Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg 2008), Artists on Tour (Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna 2008), unORTnung IV—Copa Cagrana (Vienna 2008)

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